


Say What You Want

by DetectiveJoan



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Asexual Character, Canon Bisexual Character, Cuddling & Snuggling!, F/M, M/M, Mostly Post-Canon, Multi, Queerplatonic Relationships!, ambiguous TAMA-compliance, characters who deserve good things!!!, domesticity!, happy endings!, one (1) reference to canon alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 07:07:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20811071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: So she follows Frank to Chicago once he gets his feet underneath him. They box themselves into a one-bedroom on the south side; it’s barely big enough to turn around in, but that means they can hear each other from nearly anywhere in the apartment. It’s comforting and it’s comfortable.She hadn’t quite expected anyone else to join them but Mark turns up anyway.





	Say What You Want

**Author's Note:**

> Listen. We’re all dealing with whatever The AM Archives was in our own way. If I want to finally finish writing that self-indulgent polyam qpr thing I’ve been kicking around for like a year and title it after lyrics from [a latin pop anthem from 1999](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feYwLT4DSDo) that’s my business.

Chloe couldn’t pinpoint when she and Frank stopped talking, exactly. Now that they’ve both got a handle on their abilities there doesn’t seem to be a point to most verbalization. She reads his thoughts and he reads her emotions, and it’s a form of communication more thorough and intimate and easy than anything she could have dreamed. 

It unnerves Sam, the way they wordlessly exist around-with-through each other. Chloe knows this before her friend opens her mouth, but she lets Sam say it anyway.

“Isn’t it kind of creepy? Being in each other’s heads like that all the time?” 

“Not really,” Chloe shrugs.

Sam frowns. “Don’t you ever want to keep things to yourself?” 

“We do still spend time apart, Sam. It’s not like our abilities work long range.” 

“But you live together,” Sam presses, “so you can’t get that much time away from each other.” 

“We get enough.”

_ What about sex_ is the thing Sam really wants to know, but she doesn’t ask so Chloe doesn’t answer. 

Sex is slippery because desire isn’t articulate. It slides between thoughts and feelings, smudging out the line between them. 

Chloe doesn’t desire, doesn’t long, doesn’t crave. No active verbs. It does occur to her, passively, occasionally, that he might be nice to have. 

Frank watches her laugh and paint and study and do laundry and color her own hair and file taxes, and he wants and he wants and he wants until she can taste it. 

When they kiss the first time, it’s finally walking off a cliff edge with both eyes open. It’s months in the making, and a split-second decision. It’s the happiest inevitability. 

He thinks—this is right. This could have been a mistake, but it isn’t.

She feels love and loved everywhere. She feels it in the tips of her fingers and the soles of her feet, in her knees and elbows, in her gut and in her head and in her heart, and he cradles her face with both of his hands and drinks the feeling from her lips. 

So she follows him to Chicago once he gets his feet underneath him. They box themselves into a one-bedroom on the south side; it’s barely big enough to turn around in, but that means they can hear each other from nearly anywhere in the apartment. It’s comforting and it’s comfortable. 

There had been times in the woods when the quiet of her own mind had been so deafening, a kind of psychic tinnitus reverberating through her skull, that she’d come to dread the possibility of long-term isolation. Now she can turn the dial down when she needs to, but he’s never less than a background hum, a soothing ambiance. 

She hadn’t quite expected anyone else to join them but Mark turns up anyway, wearing the exhaustion he always does. 

“Would you mind maybe…” he says, making a twisting motion at his temple. “I don’t think I’m really ready to have someone in my brain right now.” 

“Roger,” she says, copying his movement and clicking her tongue like she’s turning the sound off. The better metaphor is actually that there’s a dozen radios stacked in her head and she’s collapsed the antenna of the one tuned to his frequency. She can still hear everyone else, but she’s not picking up more than a buzz of static from him. 

“Thanks,” he says, and gives her a loose hug. 

“It’s good to see you,” she says, and returns the embrace tightly. 

It would be better to hear him; his thoughts weren’t always pretty, but there was something about the heft of them, a smooth weight that felt nice in her mental grip. 

“I’m sure you think that about all the boys,” he deflects. 

He lets Frank in his feelings, though. They drag each other through most every art museum in the city. Frank shows Mark his favorite local tearooms, and Mark resumes his habit of losing spectacularly at chess. Watching it all from the other side of the room, Chloe’s almost surprised that it takes a full week before she comes home and finds the two of them kissing in the hallway outside their apartment door. It’s quiet and it’s soft and it’s languorous, and she thinks—here’s the queer part of queerplatonic.

She gives them time to get their bearings with her addition. Mark nearly apologizes, glancing at her over Frank’s shoulder guiltily, but Frank holds him quiet with a look and waits for him to pull Chloe’s ability enough to know there’s nothing to be sorry for.

Frank slips one of his hands from Mark’s waist so he can take Chloe’s outstretched hand instead, and then he kisses Mark again just as sweetly as before.

“Y’know, you could poison a guy with that much tenderness,” Mark says, a bit out of breath. Maybe it could be a joke, but even Chloe can feel there’s an anxiousness underneath it. 

“You have to build up a tolerance,” Frank says. “Let us help you with that.” 

Chloe lets them into the apartment, and Mark lets himself be lead down the hall to the bedroom. He hesitates at the doorway, glancing back at Chloe with an eyebrow quirked. 

“Volume’s off, remember?” she says. “I’m not hearing anything you can’t say in front of Frank.” 

“I don’t want to mess this up,” Mark admits cautiously. “What you two have…” 

“You won’t,” Frank assures him. “We built it carefully. It’s pretty sturdy. I know you’re nervous, but I don’t think you could break it if you tried.” 

Mark remains incongruously tense. Chloe steps close behind him and wraps her arms around his middle. He’s shorter than Frank but she still has to stretch to hook her chin over his shoulder. He melts back into her touch, slouching to ease her access. 

“Why don’t you turn the volume down on yourself,” she nudges. 

“Easier said,” Mark mutters, but this time when Frank pulls him towards the bed he goes easily. 

Frank reels him in, cupping his face and kissing him again before letting his hands drift down. 

“You could turn the volume up on Chloe instead,” Frank suggests. “Pay attention to the way she carries her calmness in the tops of her shoulders—right here. And how she always holds her affection for me in her sternum.”

His right hand slides down Mark’s chest to rest over his heart. 

“Yeah, I’ve been reading that loud and clear,” Mark says. 

Frank smiles. “Can you feel the trust,” he asks, “in her hands?” 

He takes Mark’s hands, presses a soft kiss to the knuckles of each and it’s this, for some reason, that spreads a wide blush over Mark’s cheeks. 

Chloe leaves them to their slow exploration. She unbuckles her sandals and wraps her hair, then settles on the far edge of the bed so when Frank finally coaxes Mark onto the mattress she’s there waiting.

There’s a deep flush all across Mark’s face, visible even over his warm coloring. She wants to paint him, to layer his long eyelashes and mussed hair and slim nose onto a canvas with thick browns and reds and yellows. She settles for running her fingers into his hair at all the same places Frank had just let go. 

“You can touch me,” she invites. She imagines his hands sliding up from her hips to her waist under her shirt; he listens, and he follows her lead. His skin is warm against hers. She leans back and he follows her here, too, until they’re lying side by side and face to face. There’s inches between them. 

She could kiss him now, but she wants to hear him when she does. 

Mark watches her lips intently.

“I’ve never done anything like this before. With the telepathy, I mean. It’s kind of…” he grasps for the right word.

“Nice?” Frank supplies, settling into the space all along Mark’s back. He nuzzles another kiss behind Mark’s ear, and Chloe watches Mark’s eyes flutter closed. 

“Yeah,” Mark says. “_ Nice.”_

He says it like he’s going for genuine but he’s never before tried to form that word in that tone. 

So Mark lets himself learn how to be loved inch by inch.

He sleeps in their bed, cradled in between them until he overheats after midnight and has to clamber over Chloe and prod her toward the center of the mattress as he kicks his way out from under the comforter. He lets Frank cook for him, and he lets Chloe pile his plate high and scold him when he’s too polite to ask for seconds of everything. He doesn’t object when Chloe appropriates one of his old shirts to paint in, and tumbles his laundry in with theirs, and makes him do the ironing because it’s her least favorite chore. 

They stop keeping alcohol in the pantry. Mark starts singing in the shower. It’s all stupidly domestic and lovely, even if Chloe can’t quite get into the swing of having to listen to Mark's words instead of his thoughts. 

“I think I’m okay with you turning the volume on,” Mark finally says one afternoon while she’s sitting on the living room floor, folding socks and half-watching a Lifetime movie marathon. “If you want.”

“Oh? I mean, if you’re sure,” she says, like he’s just offered her the last of the leftover plantains from her favorite food truck instead of unrestricted access to his brain. 

Maybe it’s that easy. He nods; she extends the antenna.

What’s playing in the background of his mind is a slow melody of want, a tune so familiar he must’ve overheard Frank humming it. Frank isn’t here now but it’s all him, that desire to have her, remixed over Mark’s beat of curiosity and hesitation. She feels it too, suddenly—the want, the desire, nearly the need, to have Mark’s thoughts closer to her.

He comes the moment she realizes she might want him to. They fall into a kiss and it doesn’t take any time at all to find a rhythm; it’s like they’ve already done this a hundred times before.

He kisses her back to the couch and then flat against the cushions, and he lands in the space she makes for him between her legs as she fumbles her pants open.

She knows he and Frank have made love, but they’ve mostly kept it to when she’s out of the house. That’s been fine, really—she’s just as satisfied by her own hand in the shower as anything else—but the dry spell on her end means that now she’s that much more sensitive to his hands feeling her up, groping her breasts and tickling down her ribs before he reaches into her open jeans and slides his fingers through her wetness. 

Chloe understands suddenly that she’d never previously understood what it meant when Dr. Bright had casually mentioned the AM ranked Mark’s control as perfect. She only gets it now, when he’s hearing and responding to her with such speed and accuracy that it feels more like intuition, like he’s having the same ideas at the same time as she is. He pulls her expertise on her own body and uses it to touch her like he’s already had years to learn exactly how to make her light up.

He moves to roll off her after she comes; it’s the most ridiculous thing, that she has to keep her knees up to cage him in place, that he can’t tell she’s not done wanting him yet. Sex is the easiest vulnerability, but it’s not her favorite.

Easy—he scoffs, making a mental show of the strain on his wrist and fingers from the exertion he’d just put in for her benefit. 

Oh, like it was entirely altruistic—she thinks with a fond eye roll. 

She pulls him back down until his face is nestled against her neck. Her nails softly scrape up the bumps of his spine, around the wings of his shoulder blades, along the furrows between his ribs until he slowly relaxes into her.

So they both still have some things to learn from each other. That’s okay. They’ve got time. 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'm DetectiveJoan and you can find me on [tumblr](http://detectivejoan.tumblr.com/)


End file.
